Upmark

A HTML to Markdown converter.

Installation

gem install upmark

Usage

In ruby:

require "upmark"
html = %q{<p>messenger <strong>bag</strong> skateboard</p>}
markdown = Upmark.convert(html)
puts markdown

From the command-line:

> upmark foo.html

You can also pipe poorly formatted HTML documents through tidy before piping them into upmark:

> cat bar.html | tidy -asxhtml -indent -quiet --show-errors 0 --show-warnings 0 --show-body-only 1 --wrap 0 | upmark

Features

Upmark will convert the following (arbitrarily nested) HTML elements to Markdown:

  • strong
  • em
  • p
  • a
  • h1, h2, h3
  • ul
  • ol
  • br

It will also pass through block and span-level HTML elements (e.g. table, div, span, etc) which aren't used by Markdown.

How it works

Upmark defines a parsing expression grammar (PEG) using the very awesome Parslet gem. This PEG is then used to convert HTML into Markdown in 4 steps:

  1. Parse the XHTML into an abstract syntax tree (AST).
  2. Normalize the AST into a nested hash of HTML elements.
  3. Mark the block and span-level subtrees which should be ignored (table, div, span, etc).
  4. Convert the AST leaves into Markdown.

License

Upmark is Copyright (c) 2014 The Conversation Media Group and distributed under the MIT license.